Headline News
Join our mailing list to receive a weekly transportation news round-up, plus Berkeley Transportation Quarterly, our research news publication.
-
When a route is proposed for the California bullet train, opponents mobilize. In the Central Valley, Kings County farmers are protesting a line that would run through prime agricultural land. In Southern California, the city of Palmdale has sued to force the state High-Speed Rail Authority to build a line to serve northern Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley. But the bitterest dispute over the $45 billion bullet train’s route may be playing out on the San Francisco Peninsula. There, a coalition of environmentalists and local cities has gone to court twice to challenge the project.... UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies also looked at the issue. That study, commissioned by the state Senate, declared that the rail authority’s model was “flawed at key decision-making junctures,” as institute Director Samer Madanat put it. Like the citizens group, the UC study found survey bias, saying that in polling on whether business travelers would switch to bullet trains, too many air travelers and not enough motorists were surveyed. The model also exaggerated the importance of frequent service in predicting ridership, the institute said. In the end, the study was too unreliable to predict whether high-speed rail would “incur significant revenue shortfalls,” the institute said.
California Watch -
California's proposed high-speed rail project, battered by an uncommonly long series of very critical state audits and analyses, is reaching a political crossroads, says one influential state senator....In less than three months, the nine-member High-Speed Rail Authority board must devise "plans B and C," as Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) puts it, for raising more than $43 billion to build the train system should the federal government back out.
Voice of OC -
Among the nation's 50 largest cities, San Francisco was the second most walkable, after New York, and Oakland ranked 10th, said Seattle's Walk Score, which assigns numerical ratings on a scale of 1 to 100 that quantify how close any address is to amenities like grocery stores, restaurants, schools and parks. Being within one-quarter mile of destinations garners the highest ratings.
SF Chronicle -
The victim, a woman whose name was not immediately released, was hit by a truck at the corner of Fremont and Mission streets shortly after 8 a.m. She was taken by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital, where she was being treated for life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
SF Chronicle -
Despite continuing criticism and increased uncertainty of federal funding for the Central Subway, the Board of Supervisors gave the $1.6 billion project a strong vote of support Tuesday by approving $57 million in transportation sales tax money to buy tunnel boring machines and start the tunneling process....Last month, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency awarded a $233.6 million contract for the tunneling work. Tuesday's money will help pay for that work, which includes purchase of two oversize tunnel-boring machines and the construction of the starting point for the tunneling operation near Fourth and Bryant streets.
SF Chronicle -
... Martin Wachs, a senior principal researcher at RAND Corp., said..."it's necessary to project costs low to make a project look attractive. And it's often the case that unknown factors, and unanticipated factors, result in costs proving to be higher than they are anticipated to be at the beginning." If California's bullet train ends up like other major transportation infrastructure projects, he said, "one would suspect that the current cost estimates would prove to be low in comparison with the actual costs." That shouldn't automatically nix it, Wachs added. Project planners can write the contracts in ways that keep cost overruns from running out of control. Lawmakers can write other precautions into law.
New York Times -
Alexie Kolpak and Jeffrey Grossman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology propose a new type of solar thermal fuel that would be affordable, rechargeable, thermally stable, and more energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries. Their proposed design combines an organic photoactive molecule, azobenzene, with the ever-popular carbon nanotube.
Wired -
Environmental and public health groups filed suit against theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Monday, saying the agency has failed to force officials to crack down on smog in the Los Angeles Basin....The Los Angeles area has a long history of elevated ozone levels, and the American Lung Assn., in its annual State of the Air report, recently determined that the region has the highest ozone level in the nation.
LA Times -
Killer bees never did swarm the Southwest, the Y2K bug was squashed, the world didn't end on May 21 and "Carmageddon" wasn't. Now that we've finished freaking out about the weekend closure of 10 miles of the 405 Freeway, can we do something about the fact that it's Carmageddon every single day in West Los Angeles? Last weekend demonstrated that Angelenos really can change their driving behavior if they're motivated to do so. It's not the first time they've done it. During the 1984 Olympics, when the pre-event hype about traffic nightmares was at least as intense as the media warnings about Carmageddon, commuter traffic across the city was a breeze. It's not hard to get people out of their cars during extraordinary events; the tough thing is doing it on a daily basis.
LA Times -
The success of Carmageddon has given way to a political and lifestyle question: If L.A. residents can cut their driving for one weekend, how can they be encouraged to drive less the rest of the time? The closure of the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass came with the threat of epic gridlock — but the exact opposite happened. Streets and freeways were clear. California Department of Transportation statistics show significantly fewer cars on some freeways and significantly less traffic, even in areas far from the 405.
LA Times